Horizon Zero Dawn was one of my favorite games of last gen. The more I uncovered about this post-apocalyptic Rocky Mountain world and how it came to be overrun with machines that looked oddly like our own wildlife, the more I became enthralled.
Dealing with those machines just added to my love of the game – sneaking around and laying traps, sniping them from afar, overriding them and turning them against each other…the possibilities were endless. The open world was big and not short on things to do and collect, but the game didn’t overload you with too much or overstay its welcome. Add in a likable cast of characters, including a strong protagonist in Aloy, and you’ve got the makings of a truly masterful game.
When the sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, came out in 2022, I was excited to play it eventually, but the $70 asking price of current-gen games got in the way of me buying it at launch. It went on sale over the holidays though, and I wound up getting the game for Christmas…and promptly put it on my shelf, never getting around to tackling it. But, here we are, almost two and a half years later, and I’m finally playing the long-awaited sequel to one of my favorite games.
Actually, I’ve been playing it for almost two months.
You see, Forbidden West is big. Monstrously so. In their quest to create a bigger, better sequel to Zero Dawn, Guerrilla Games seems to have embraced one single design philosophy: more, more, MORE. I’ve been playing the game for over 60 hours as of the time of writing this post, and there’s still so much of the game I haven’t even seen. But the question that’s come to mind throughout my time with Forbidden West is…does bigger necessarily mean better? And at what point does the desire to cram everything but the kitchen sink into a game work to its detriment?
Before I get too far into this, let me preface that I still think Forbidden West is a good game that does a lot of things well. It tells an interesting story (though obviously not as mystery-filled and attention-grabbing as the first game’s), the machine design is still fantastic, and the world is well-designed for the most part. Even though this article might sound overly negative, I wouldn’t have stuck with the game this long if I wasn’t enjoying it.
But holy crap, there’s just so much. The world map is so gigantic and full of icon vomit that it puts the Assassin’s Creed series to shame: collectibles, side quests, errands, rebel camps and outposts, hunting grounds, relic ruins, salvage contracts, and a host of other things to do when you want to deviate from the main quest. It’s a bit overwhelming, and there have been many play sessions where I’ve sat down and thought “I’m going to get *this* done today” and then wound up spending two hours just going around doing various side content. The map is designed so that you pretty much always have something “just over there” to grab your attention, and my condolences to anyone who tries to do a 100% completion run of the game.
There’s also Machine Strike, the requisite competitive minigame (since every open-world game has to have one of those now after Gwent) that I tried exactly twice and never touched again. Seriously…it’s not good.
The “more” mantra extends to the gameplay systems as well. In Zero Dawn you had a variety of weapons and a selection of ammo types to approach combat as you see fit. Tearing components off machines weakened them, disabled their attacks, and left you with crafting materials. You could approach combat in a number of ways; going in arrows blazing (literally) or picking machines off from a distance were both viable options. Or you could sneak around in the tall grass, laying traps, silent killing machines, and even taking control of them to fight on your side.
Forbidden West kicks this into overdrive. Not only are there ten different weapon types, but each individual weapon within those types can only use specific elemental or damage-type ammo. Elemental weaknesses are a huge part of Forbidden West, and the game wants you to constantly be sure that you have a good variety of both weapon and ammo types in your loadout. Balancing them all can become a chore, and often I find myself just peppering enemies with arrows or explosive javelins because I don’t feel like micromanaging my equipment.
Not only that, but there’s an extensive crafting mechanic in the game, and every single weapon and piece of armor has at least four or five levels of upgradeability that adds new perks and skills. Upgrading to the max level is an immense grind for resources, especially for later-game equipment, and more than once I’ve upgraded something fully only to receive a fresh new piece of equipment that’s just flat-out better.
And you’ll need that better equipment, because the machines in Forbidden West are aggressive as hell. They’re constantly in your face, knocking Aloy to the ground only for her to slowly stand back up and get immediately pummeled to the ground again. It’s really frustrating when you’re trying to shoot off a component (because that’s a new thing too: if you need a certain component, you have to target it and shoot it until it detaches – I did this for about 3/4ths of my playtime thus far before I got tired of it and enabled the option for the Zero Dawn style loot system that just requires you to defeat the machine to get its parts) and the machines are launching themselves at you, spraying elemental blasts your way, or jumping around like a cricket on crack. Zero Dawn‘s combat was so good because you could deal with the machines in lots of different ways including from afar, whereas Forbidden West seems like it’s going for a lot more up-close-and-personal action (probably to encourage you to use the plethora of gear you’ve amassed), and I think that it suffers a bit because the combat system just isn’t particularly built for that.
In addition to the various icons that you’ll see all over the map, you’ll pick up side quests and errands galore throughout the journey through Forbidden West. Errands are shorter endeavors – go here, pick up these things, defeat a machine or two, done – but the game’s side quests tend to be pretty substantial.
Like everything else, though, they tend to be too substantial. Side quests in Forbidden West are, on average, 30-40 minute affairs, with some clocking in closer to an hour or more. They generally follow the same formula: go to the designated place, either investigate with your Focus or chat with a minor side character, fight some machines, talk some more, go to another place, fight some more machines, talk some more, fight a big “miniboss” machine, even more talking, and finally get a reward. And there are a lot of them – almost 30 in the base game, in fact. After a bit, the formula gets stale and they all start to run together. And the talking is not an exaggeration; these are some of the most long-winded dialogue trees for minor side characters that I’ve ever seen in a game.
In some ways, my thoughts about the side quests in Forbidden West mirror my thoughts about the ones in Final Fantasy XVI, which I played through last year and greatly enjoyed. There are way too many in both games, and at least the quest design formula in Forbidden West is leagues better than the most-generic-fetch-quests-ever in XVI. But the payoff in XVI was fantastic world-building and development of characters I had grown to love, whereas I struggle to actually care about a lot of the minor quest characters in Forbidden West enough to justify the very lengthy exposition and the time I have to devote to complete each quest.
That being said, there are still some fantastic quests in the game, and many heartfelt moments to be had with characters I adore, and I’m still taking breaks from the main quest to complete side quests between chapters. I just wish they’d trimmed the fat a bit and tightened up both the quests themselves and the dialogue.
I think a lot of the issues can be traced back to an admittedly tricky-to-solve problem. Zero Dawn hooked me with its story on top of its gameplay. There was a huge mystery to solve, and several jaw-dropping moments as things became clearer as to what the hell happened to leave the world in this state. And the plot of Zero Dawn seems even more oddly pertinent and terrifyingly possible considering the events we’re living through right now. It sucked me in like very few other games have, and to this day it’s still one of my favorite plots in all of gaming.
In Forbidden West, however, the mystery has mostly been revealed, and while the plot is still fairly solid, it’s missing that big hook. It seems like the developers knew this, and so they decided to throw everything including the kitchen sink into the game to make it bigger and better than the prequel and to always offer you something to grab your attention. The problem is that they went way overboard, and the game gets bogged down under all the bloat and loses its way a bit.
Again, I’m overall greatly enjoying Forbidden West despite all my complaining about everything being too big and bloated. But after 60+ hours, I’m exhausted, and I’m starting to make decisions to actively not engage in large swathes of the content it offers. Rather than try to do everything like the completionist inside me urges me to do, I’ve started being selective about what side quests I do. I’ll probably never explore the entire map, and I’ll definitely never finish all the challenges and collectibles littering the landscape. But that’s fine, because ultimately games are supposed to be fun – not checklists.
As much as I’ve enjoyed my time with Forbidden West. I’m just ready to move on at this point, and that’s a good sign that it’s time to start powering through to the end. Thankfully, that is an option, and I think that someone could probably just beeline the main story and save the side content for postgame if they wanted to, at least based on the level suggestions of the main quests (that I’m way over at this point because I can’t help but try to be a completionist and do the side content even when I’ve gotten tired of it). And honestly, the main storyline isn’t super long on its own, when removed from all the other stuff to distract you from the main path. By the time this article goes up and B2B is live, I very well might have beaten the game already.
I’ll close by quickly saying that this isn’t just a Horizon problem. Most triple-A games nowadays, especially open-world ones, suffer from varying degrees of bloat. When players are paying $70 for a game, they want enough content to justify that purchase. That incentivizes developers to turn every new big-budget game into a multi-dozen-hour behemoth stuffed to the gills with content, much of which is either abstract trinkets to collect or outright padding. But I’m the type of person that would rather have a tight, focused 15-hour experience than a 100-hour slog that’s stuffed to the gills with random stuff, and that’s why I think that I tend to be a lot more selective about which modern triple-A open-world games I actually engage with lately.
But if that’s the type of game you love: if you want to get lost running around an absolutely enormous map looking for “just one more” collectible, or if diving into crafting systems and tweaking your inventory is your jam, or if you love to spend dozens of hours doing side content and exploring without touching the main quest, then Horizon Forbidden West is for you. It’s a fantastic game, truly. I just wish there wasn’t so much of it.
